Name: The Unbelievable Story of the Carol of the Bells
Uploaded: 2024-12-31T20:17:28.000Z
Duration: 14 min 55 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

there's something magical about the Carol of the Bells, and I say that as someone who's not usually a huge fan of Christmas music.

Adverbs of degree

when we hit that time of year where every radio station switches from their normal playlists to just 24-7 Christmas, I'm one of those people who, well, I don't complain out loud, but

I'll mutter something under my breath if I don't think anyone will hear me.

I've always said that if you can't find anything you like in an entire genre of music, you're not looking hard enough.

for me, for Christmas, that's usually songs like Fairytale of New York, What's This?, and River, but honestly, those answers kinda feel like cheating.

each of them has its own way of subverting the sort of optimistic innocence that makes traditional Christmas music so distinct.

put simply, none of them get played in grocery stores.

Carol of the Bells is the song I always listen for because it's unambiguously a Christmas classic, but it's also a stone-cold banger.

which is why I wasn't that surprised to learn that, while these days it's one of the most popular songs in the Christmas canon, it was never meant to be.

it was originally about something completely different, and I promise, you have no idea where this story is about to go.

the song that we now know as the Carol of the Bells began its life in Ukraine, as a song called Shchedrik, by the composer Mykola Leontovich.

or, actually, it began its life a little earlier than that.

Leontovich had been hired to arrange a piece of music based on the centuries-old Ukrainian folk tradition of Shchedrivki, which were well-wishing songs sung by children to celebrate the new year.

that might sound a little Christmassy, but an important thing to understand here is that, in pre-Christian Ukraine, the new year was celebrated not in winter, but at the start of spring.

and we can see this in Shchedrik's lyrics, which, according to anthropologist Anthony

Potoczniak, Leontovich most likely found in a book of traditional Ukrainian folk songs, although he may also have remembered them from his childhood.

they tell the story of a swallow visiting a man to show him all the wonderful bounties the spring has brought, from new crops to a growing flock of sheep to a wife who… ok, the literal translation is that she has dark eyebrows, but contemporary Ukrainian listeners would have known that that was a colloquial way of calling her beautiful.

kinda like if I said she had ruby lips, but with a different set of cultural beauty standards.

but to say that Shchedrik had nothing to do with Christmas is, perhaps, an oversimplification.

after all, while Shchedrivki were a pagan tradition, Leontovich himself was a devout member of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and his father and grandfather were both priests.

and while pagan Ukraine celebrated the new year in spring, by the early 20th century they had long since moved to the Christian calendar, celebrating it in winter and taking their traditional New Year's rituals with it.

in fact, according to Potoczniak, Shchedrik itself was commissioned for a Christmas concert, so while the lyrics are drawn from pagan roots, don't reference the holiday, and are about an entirely different season, the association didn't appear out of thin air.

the Leontovich Museum even says that not long after the song's premiere, a friend of his began distributing a version that replaced those lyrics with a story about the birth of Jesus.

the song's potential as a Christmas classic was clear from pretty early on.

but for the most part, in those early years, Leontovich's folk-inspired lyrics were the norm, and while they were by no means a political song, the historical circumstances of the time made their political implications inescapable.

Shchedrik premiered in 1916, and became popular in Ukraine during the early years of the Russian

as you might imagine, this made the concept of Ukrainian cultural identity… complicated.

for much of the 19th century, Ukrainians had been subjected to harsh restrictions on the expression of their culture, in an effort by Russian rulers to assimilate them into

according to the Value of Circular of 1863, the Ukrainian language wasn't even allowed to be used in religious or educational texts.

they were subjects of Russia, and they were legally required to act like it.

but as so often happens in these circumstances, the Ukrainian people balked at the restrictions, and by Leontovich's time, there was a renewed interest in reclaiming their unique cultural heritage.

and with revolution in the air across the Russian territories, the time was ripe for a work like Shchedrik that celebrated the traditional melodies and rituals of pre-Russian

so if this melody is so tied to Ukrainian culture and the coming of spring, how did it become The Carol of the Bells, a song that has nothing to do with spring or Ukraine?

and don't get me wrong, Shchedrik itself is still alive and well, with new versions being recorded by Ukrainian artists to this day.

check out this version by Tina Carroll which features some pretty sick birdcall solos, or this version by the YouTuber Aileen which faithfully translates the original lyrics to English.

but according to Ukrainian ethnologist Valentin Okuzik, the song took on a new life in a new America as a direct result of the revolutionary atmosphere of Eastern Europe around the time of its release.

you see, just months after Shchedrik's debut, the February Revolution led to the removal of the House of Romanov, who had ruled over Russia for the last 300 years.

suddenly, the large swathes of Ukraine that had previously been under Russian control were up for grabs.

combined with the instability all over Europe due to the whole World War I thing, Ukraine found itself deep in the throes of chaos, but also with a golden opportunity.

and they went for it, declaring an independent Ukrainian People's Republic in 1918, with the support of various European allies, most notably Poland.

and it was under the auspices of this new republic that Shchedrik began to spread across the globe, as part of the touring setlist of the Ukrainian National Chorus.

this chorus was part of an explicit project by the new Ukrainian government to build international support for their fledgling state by sharing their culture with the world, and Shchedrik was the centerpiece of their show.

and people seemed to like it, although in a very 1920s sort of way.

writing in Slate, Lydia Tomcu cites an old New York Times review that praised the performance as simply spontaneous in origin and artistically harmonized, but also describes their traditional outfits as motley costumes, and the music they sang as primitive peasant airs.

the review even refers to Ukraine as Little Russia, which the performers were not happy about.

so the tour continued, even after its purpose had failed.

in 1921, Poland and Russia signed the Treaty of Riga, effectively ending the Ukrainian

People's Republic and dividing its territory between them.

there was no more independent Ukraine to build support for, but given the political nature of their project, the performers were afraid to return home.

instead, they kept on playing, and once the tour ended, its remaining members settled permanently as immigrants in North America.

the Treaty of Riga created chaos across Ukraine, but also a personal tragedy for our story.

the murder of Mykola Leontovich, and oh my god, this was supposed to be a fun little video about a Christmas carol I think is neat, why am I talking about murder?

I promise I'll move on soon, but I feel like it would be irresponsible to not tell this part of the story.

I've read a lot of accounts of what happened, and to be honest, there's a lot we still don't know.

on January 22nd, 1921, Leontovich was visiting his father in the village of Tulkin.

late in the evening, a man showed up at their door, claiming to have been hunting bandits in the area, and asked if he could spend the night.

the next morning, he shot Leontovich and fled the scene.

early speculation was that it was a robbery gone wrong, but eventually government documents were unearthed that identified the killer as an agent of the Cheka, the institutional precursor of the KGB, making it very likely that this was a politically motivated execution.

the exact reason for targeting Leontovich is still unknown, but Kuzik argues it was most likely due to his involvement in the Ukrainian autocephalous Orthodox Church, an organization that sought religious independence from Russia at a time when the new Soviet government was not friendly to religion.

this all set the stage for the modern Carol of the Bells, but we're still missing one key player, which brings us back to the Ukrainian National Chorus.

after touring in Europe, they came to America, and their first stop was Carnegie Hall.

it was a sold-out show, and somewhere in the crowd that night may have been the Ukrainian-American composer Peter Vilhusky.

I say may have because, according to TomCue, historians haven't actually been able to definitively place him at the event.

it's a better story if he was there, but the chorus also made an album that year with Brunswick

Records, and it's possible Vilhusky may have just listened to that.

either way, he fell in love with Shedrick, and as an arranger for the NBC Symphony Orchestra, he had a great opportunity to help bring this song to a wider American audience.

instead of directly translating the Ukrainian lyrics, though, he decided to write new ones that more directly celebrated the Christmas season.

the accounts I've read don't really discuss his motivations here.

maybe he thought that Christmas symbolism would help the song resonate with an American audience that had no relationship with Ukrainian folk traditions, or maybe he just really liked

anyway, this sort of rewrite isn't that uncommon in Christmas music.

What Child is This is basically just Greensleeves, after all.

point is, Vilhusky published his version, now called Carol of the Bells, in 1936.

the new song was a smash hit, quickly becoming a part of the repertoire of carolers before being adopted into advertisements, film scores, and eventually even by pop artists like Lindsey

Sterling, Pentatonix, and Destiny's Child.

but there's still one musical mystery I'd like to solve.

to my ears, although on the surface it seems joyous and light, the Carol of the Bells has always had this dark, menacing undertone as well.

maybe that's just cuz I grew up with a version by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, which infuses the Christmas classic with the bombast and urgency of progressive metal, but I feel like it's more than that.

I feel like the reason this song sounds so apocalyptic to me is mostly because of a weird musical coincidence.

you see, this is the main motif of Shedrick, borrowed from a centuries-old Ukrainian folk tradition of well-wishing songs to celebrate the new year.

but to my modern ears, familiar with another century of Western music, and specifically with Hollywood film music, this also happens to be the Dies Irae.

if you're not familiar, Dies Irae is a medieval hymn about the Last Judgment.

in its most famous setting, the melody starts like this and that phrase, particularly its first four notes, have been used by composers since the 19th century as a musical codeword for death and fear.

check it out in Rachmaninoff's Isle of the Dead or another beloved Christmas tune, Making Christmas.

and barring a slight rhythmic adjustment to fit into the song's jaunty 3-4 meter, those four notes are the same four notes that make up the Carol of the Bells' main motif.

now, to be clear, Leontowicz did not do this on purpose.